Two Apollo 11 pictures from NASA’s endlessly fascinating collection of high-res photos. Both these are of Buzz Aldrin taken with Neil Armstrong’s suit-mounted Hasselblad. The one above is the most famous of the lot, of course, reproduced endlessly (I even copied it once as part of a drawing), but you hardly ever see it in its original tilted state like this; picture editors prefer to balance the horizon. The one below I hadn’t seen before in such detail. The lunar lander here looks remarkably small and fragile.

OLDER

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One of the few shows worth watching on TV here in the States, probably anywhere, is ‘Mythbusters’ – wherein a handful of goofball SFX and ballistics experts do often strange and dangerous field tests in order to either debunk or verify various urban legends, debated ‘realistic’ movie stunts, and various things people have ‘allegedly’ or really have done on youtube.

The other day they were testing those odd ideas espoused by outer fringe conspiracy theorists, that the moon landing was an elaborate fraud. Nor surprisingly, they debunked the people trying to debunk simple facts.

Now if they could only apply the same principle of exposing paranoid overly-idealists bending the facts to suit their customized version of ‘the truth’, and debunk a few other loudmouths over here . . . .hmmm.

I haven’t seen that edition of Mythbusters although I’ve seen it mentioned a few times in the past week. Having been a big enthusiast of the Illuminatus! novels in the Seventies (which created a sprawling storyline showing every major conspiracy being true), I used to have an amused intellectual curiosity about them. That was until the internet came along and made me realise how depressing and small-minded conspiracy-mongering actually is. One of the things that Illuminatus! author Robert Anton Wilson mentioned many times was how it’s impossible to argue with hardcore conspiracy nuts; they accuse you of either falling for the misinformation or being part of the conspiracy yourself (wittingly or not). What counts is that they have the truth.

A good example of a conspiracy growing from a nothing is the whole Alternative 3 business in which a fake British TV documentary was broadcast once and believed to be true by Americans who’d never seen it but read the book based on it which mischievously claimed it was in fact true. I saw the film when it was first shown and it looked semi-convincing apart from some familiar actors (Shane Rimmer) and the April 1st broadcast date at the end. I’ve also got the book. Americans now swap copies of both and keep the whole story going despite there being no evidence for any of their claims.